About the project

The goal of the project is to provide Russian citizens and policy makers with information
about nuclear weapons, arms control and disarmament based on open scientific
analysis.

The first Russian-language source of information about Soviet nuclear forces

The Russian Nuclear Forces Project started in 1991 by a group of young
Russian scientists at the Center for Arms Control Studies. At that time, there
was virtually no information
about the Soviet nuclear weapons available to the Russian public. The
little information that was available to researches drew on foreign-language
sources that were not easily accessible. The Russian Nuclear Forces Project included translating into Russian and publishing in the Soviet Union "Soviet Nuclear
Weapons," the book originally published in the United States by the
Natural Resources Defense Council in 1988 as part of their Nuclear Weapons
Databook series (Nuclear Weapons Databook: Volume IV. Soviet Nuclear
Weapons, by Thomas B. Cochran, William M. Arkin, Robert S. Norris and Jeffrey
I. Sands). It was the most authoritative open source of detailed information
about the Soviet nuclear weapons available at that time.

The Russian translation of the NRDC
Databook volume, which was published in Moscow in 1992, became the first ever
Russian-language book in open circulation that described the Soviet nuclear
arsenal.

The book was translated into Russian with help from Janna
Bogachenko, Oleg Bukharin, Peter Emelianov, Timur Kadyshev, Svetlana Kazmina,
Oleg Kazmin, Nikolai Kukharkin, Andrei Pochinski, Michail Stepanov, Maxim
Tarasenko, and Vladimir Tarasyuk. Pavel Podvig was the editor of the
translation and the principal investigator of the project. The financial
support for the publication was provided by the Natural Resources Defense
Council.

The first detailed open Russian account of the
nuclear complex

Inspired by the success of the translation of the "Soviet Nuclear
Weapons", the group at the Center for Arms Control Studies decided to produce a book that would be similar to the
American volume, but would be based on Russian sources and provide up-to-date
and accurate information about the state of the Russian nuclear forces and the
industrial infrastructure that supports it.

The research for the book began in 1996. The working group
included Oleg Bukharin of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at
the Princeton University, Boris Zhelezov and Igor Sutyagin of the U.S. and
Canada Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Timur Kadyshev, Eugene
Miasnikov, Pavel Podvig, and Maxim Tarasenko of the Center for Arms Control
Studies at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. The group was headed
by Pavel Podvig, who was the principal investigator of the project and the
editor of the book.

The research work and the publication of the book were
supported by the Ploughshares Fund and the W. Alton Jones Foundation. The
research project was also supported by the John Merck Fund.

In November 1998 the group unveiled the result of their workthe
book "Strategicheskoye yadernoye vooruzhenie Rossii," which became the first
open Russian account of the history and structure of the Soviet/Russian nuclear
complex. The book
brought together most of the information about Soviet and Russian nuclear
weapons that was available at the time, and presented it in a concise and
organized form. All the information
in the book was collected from open, primarily Russian sources. The authors have always considered
this to be the most the most important aspect of their work.

The unique character of the book made it very successful
in Russia and elsewhere. The book was especially popular with the military,
Minatom, and the experts who work on military issues.

Unfortunately, the idea of open academic research on
matters related to military policy and national security is still treated
in Russia with suspicion. In October 1999, the Federal Security Service (the
FSB, formerly the KGB) seized all undistributed copies of the book alleging that
it divulges state secrets. These allegations are, of course, absolutely
groundless. In May 2002, the FSB admitted this fact by
returning all seized copies of the book as well as all computers and working
materials.

The book is now available in English

The work on English edition of the book began almost
immediately after its publication in Moscow. Although the English edition is
mostly a translation of the Russian text, it was updated
to reflect the changes in the Russian nuclear complex and strategic forces in recent years. This work was done primarily by Pavel Podvig, who also wrote
the afterward summarizing the recent developments.

The research project that allowed keeping the book
up-to-date was supported by the John Merck Fund. The translation and
publication of the book were supported by the Security Studies Program at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a grant from the W. Alton Jones
Foundation.